Category Archives: Elections

Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Governance, Politics 2023, Representation, Responsibility

The Injustice of Rights

Leave a comment
Feed the Pig… and his employees.

We are obsessed with “RIGHTS” in the United States.  This isn’t to deny God-given, or “natural” rights, like Life, Liberty, self-defense, or Independence… or the right to one’s beliefs – about anything.  But it should raise questions in wise people’s minds about so-called “rights” that amount to immorality and other licenses to destroy.  It should make a person, especially a citizen of the United States, demand that TRUTH be part of every law and, therefore, every right that is protected by the Constitution of the United States of America.  This, of course, must mean TRUTH that is empirical and based on a structure of reality that is, itself, based on evidence.  Rights should never be based on popularity or “fad.”

To maintain a culture and a country based on empirical truths requires that the basis of truth, itself, must be controlled by the citizenry, not the government, and this requires several components and LIMITS, which we call, responsibility.  The system relies upon clear-thinking by each citizen and the ability to obtain knowledge, not just opinion, from available heritage-media, as Prudence defines it.  Heritage media is written history of both success and failure, and a wide gamut of opinion and philosophy about historic TRUTH or that serves to illuminate the shadows of historic truth.  Honesty, therefore, is essential in that culture’s economics, law and governance, and in ALL contracts, public and private.

In the imperfect processes of human civilization, society and family, mechanisms must be provided and defended that allow for correction of dishonest trends and tendencies.  The failure of course-correction in society, governance and education must, itself, be corrected as frequently as necessary in order to return to a path built on TRUTH and HONESTY.  The human tendency to take advantage of power, whether political or economic, must be correctable and, as automatically as possible, removable, so that the vast majority of citizens retain its opportunities for advancement, comfort and safety.

That is, any legitimate form of government, must deal with citizens as individuals, and, where possible, partner with each to assure individual “success” as a free and honest individual.  Both government and citizens must be acting honestly for this effect to be in balance and to manifest.  Language, therefore, must be rigidly defined as to meaning and understanding, a function of honesty that educational methods and content must be based upon.

The greatest opportunity for tyranny exists in government, no matter how benignly formed and constituted.  Police power resides in government and its only limits are a judicial system and politics.  We like to think that written law protects us as individuals, but the judicial system must agree with those writings, which requires purity of honesty.  Citizens attempt, through politics, to limit judicial power to honest jurists, but the system is imperfect.  The means to correct the course of judicial dishonesty are few and awkward to employ and, in fact, arcane on purpose.  Under the Constitution we hope that imperfect, if not dishonest, politicians will magically elevate the most honest individuals to our “Supreme” court.  It is a hope that, historically, has proven only partially fulfilled, but to a somewhat better degree than all judicial positions as a whole.  Still, the placing of power in the hands of a small number of jurists to decide Constitutional matters for thousands of others and for millions of individual citizens, is imperfect, at best, and mechanisms for correcting course even there, should be in place.

The natural limitations of foresight, to which all the crafters of the Constitution were subject, prevented planning for today’s advanced communications and democratized pollution of thought, and of honesty.  Those who took the risks of responsibility to found this nation against nearly all odds, could not conceive of an America where unskilled, unmotivated and unproductive individuals could claim the “right” to be supported by not just “the government,” but by the dishonest power of government to borrow from generations into the future for the comfort of the relatively useless today.

Nor could they have imagined a political engine that runs not on the honesty that the competition built into a democratic republic ought to ensure, but on the ability to manipulate truth and re-election bribery schemes to limit the number of citizens that might ever hold elected power.  There are serious weaknesses in our Constitutional system – not because it can’t work, but because it relies too heavily upon honesty and integrity of those to whom we relinquish power.  In other words, it fails to protect the citizens from the worst tendencies of human nature.  We can correct for these weaknesses of our Constitutional republic.

Clearly there is too great a concentration of power, political and financial, in the administrative state.  This is pleasing to leftists/Communists.  Their basic approach to life is that “experts” should be making decisions for, well, everyone who is not an oligarch.  For the wealthy, decisions are made that favor and protect them, much as we have observed during the COVID years.  Unfortunately, the political “class” is also happy with most responsibility being held by the deep state.  It removes that responsibility – and accountability – from the political personas they need to gain re-election.  Relying on elected “representatives” to reform the decades-long shift to un-representative administration of power, is a fool’s errand.  Things are too comfortable for too many of our “public servants.”

We need a Constitutional amendment that sets term limits for virtually all federal employees – elected and appointed/hired.  The “people’s business” has been subverted by an essentially communist administrative behemoth that no longer answers to the will of voters.  The American system was created to place and keep power in the hearts, heads and hands of American citizens.  To that purpose it is a failure.  Much heat is generated trying to find people to blame for this epic slippage of mission. 

Naturally, everyone is practiced at denying his or her role in the change.  It’s societal, starting with a lack of education of the average voter.  Coincidentally, the education establishment is firmly controlled by leftists.  States have played a role in the shift, as they sought out innovative ways to shift financial and other responsibilities to the federal government.  Leftists have led the efforts to shift welfare and other financial loads onto Washington, but, to their shame, conservatives have found it handy to duck those responsibilities, as well.  Nor will any state deny largesse that others are receiving… it would be unfair to their citizens, and so it has proceeded: shifting freedom, power and financial responsibility to the federal government.  Over 150 years increasingly socialist forces have transformed the basic relationships of the federal government to its citizens.  As often as it has been interpreted to protect citizens’ rights, the Constitution is as likely to defend socialist shifts of rights and responsibilities to government.  It’s obscene.

The money controlled by bureaucrats, more than three quarters of whom are leftists, easily sways corporate policies, creating a nearly irresistible force of control over 330 million citizens.  It doesn’t seem to matter who they are convinced to elect.  The direction of government tends to continue toward the left, which is globalist, now.  The independence of individuals and even of the entire nation, is no longer a national goal, nor is it likely, although possible, that citizens can reverse the course away from liberty and free enterprise, and even Constitutionalism.  The only option to reverse the course of global Communism is to amend the Constitution by adding tools and limits that the administrative (and elective) states would never permit, if that amending were in their hands.  Our Founders anticipated this.

Article Five of our Constitution provides for adding Amendments via two different processes.  The only one that has been employed to date is what may be called the Congressional process.  A two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate can propose an Amendment that may – or may not – be approved by the legislatures or popular votes of three-fourths of the States.  This has been done, starting with the Bill of Rights, 27 times.  It is not a perfect process, having included some glaring errors like the eighteenth and twenty-fifth amendments.  The process is totally political and responds to democratic whims. [See: https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2021/06/27/boneheaded-25th/ ]

The alternate process is referred to as “Convention of the States” and requires that two-thirds of the States’ legislatures approve of an application to hold a convention for the purpose of proposing Amendments.  It states that “the Congress” … “shall call a Convention for proposing amendments…”  It is not clear that that “call” would require a two-thirds vote in both houses as the first process does.   But it definitely says, “…shall call…” and there is no stipulation that a “law” must be passed, so, it seems Prudent to say, a majority of the two houses should call the convention.  There are risks.

One is that the Left, Fascists and Communists, NEVER retreat from their mission: the destruction of individual sovereignty, liberty and responsibility.  We have seen that laws are meaningless in their view of history – RULES are the coin of their realm.  LAWS imply shared values of morality like, well, the Ten Commandments and their ilk.  Rules are made by rulers… and they will tell everyone what is right, wrong and moral when necessary.  Rules evolve, in their view, as do morals, including the number one, most-moral Rule of all: evolution must serve the State (which often means, One Party) and if it does then that is what is moral.

Great vitriol will spew forth if the magic number of 34 is reached.  Congress and the rest of the power establishment has no intention of relinquishing any of what they hold dear.  A Convention of the States could, if carefully managed, redress many imbalances in what should be a federal system of governance.  Most people don’t know what that term means.  The alternative is a “national” government – not what the Constitution created… and LIMITED.

One of the worst consequences of the national administrative, unelected “state,” is our astronomical debt.  Congresses since the Johnson Administration and the nationalization of welfare, have buried the American nation and people in, now, over 32 Trillions of dollars of debt.  Over this period of decline, every problem leftists could give a name to became a “crisis” or a “war” on this or that social ill.  Where is the honesty?  One wonders.

Arguments over “raising the debt ceiling” are annually fruitless.  Those who live their best lives amidst the swamp of Washington are always so deeply concerned about “defaulting on the debt,” something the United States of America, for Heaven’s sake, would never allow!  Oh, the horror!  Of course, there is interest to be paid for the privilege of never repaying the debt, itself, now in the range of $500 BILLION every year, which is a lot of Meals on Wheels.  It’s a lot of drug and other mental health treatment; it’s a lot of policing and incarceration of rabid criminals; it’s a lot of a lot of things.  Janet Yellen now wants to rate the INTEREST on the debt in terms of its fraction of Gross Domestic Product.  She had to go some to find a comparator that makes the interest bomb look small.  Where’s the honesty?

A Convention of the States could bring about amendments that would limit spending to actual revenues of the previous year.  What a concept.  Any revenue – and that means every penny – in excess of that figure would pay down the debt: another concept, hard for Washington to grasp.  How does YOUR Congressman or woman propose to pay down the debt?  Eliminate “wasteful” spending and “fraud?”  When the Defense Department fails to account for multiple billions of dollars, is that wasteful or fraudulent?  When Medicare is defrauded of billions every year, is that wasteful?  When States use Medicaid funds to pay other expenses, is that wasteful?  Or fraudulent?  If everyone from Congress on up is in on the game, it can’t be fraud, can it?

How about everything from health care to the National Institutes of Health, the CDC and Fauci’s NIAID be returned to the States, free from federal politics?  Do you think the pharmaceutical industry would have more or less influence over actual health… as opposed to lifetime drug consumption?  Maybe land-use policies could be returned to the States, as well.  Is federal binding-up of nearly 30% of the country, disallowing joint use for profit, national security and recreation… is that wasteful?  Maybe the “work” of the energy Department could return to the States.  Who would miss that agency except those who garner money in their pockets by dealing with a handful of bureaucrats instead of elected officials?

Maybe an amendment could remove politics from the FBI and restore it to investigating and fighting federal-law offenses while coordinating States’ cooperation for additional crime-fighting.  Policing should be a State matter, anyway.  It’s none of Congress’ business how States control crime and incarceration unless Constitutional rights are abused.

Fully HALF of Federal Agencies, Departments, offices could be eliminated, gone, kaput.  Few would miss them, again except for those who line their pockets by interacting with them.  If they are actually partnering in the success of American citizens, then keep them.  Otherwise, put every one on a separate line-item to be voted up or down every other year.  Perhaps the Congress could actually serve citizens instead of itself.  It might mean some hard work, though.

And let’s put limits on consecutive terms for every elected official who is paid more than an expense stipend, universally, but let States decide what they should be in their State.  These might include how many terms a previously elected office-holder must stay out of the process of running again.  But EVERY elected official should have to prosper in the private sector and live under the laws he or she helped pass.  Being in Congress or States’ legislatures or elected executive office is NOT a profession – it’s a sacrifice of service to neighbors, communities and country.  I guarantee we’d have different kinds of people in office – and different offices bound by different laws – which are the points.

Biden, Economics, Elections, Politics 2023, Responsibility

“Charlie” McCarthy

Leave a comment

Mr. Kevin McCarthy, ostensible Speaker of the House of Representatives of the People of the United States of America, in Congress, assembled, sans acclaim, is either confused or a compromised fool.  In his one opportunity to negotiate anything with the ostensible President of those same United States, sans acclaim, McCarthy managed to scrape the crumbs from the dinner trencher of the Big Guy, nearly dislocating his RIGHT shoulder from patting his own back in triumph.

Not a word was said about the defense of America and her people, or about the open border that threatens us, all.  Across the table from a documented criminal-President, McCarthy’s deep, deep concerns floated to the surface… of the Swamp – they were mostly air, after all… air-time, most accurately.  His leadership was on brilliant display, however, as he led his party to, ummnnh… well, nowhere.

Where does the Constitution permit the FEDERAL government to impose costs – illegal costs – upon the States of the Union?  Where does the Congress get the right to finance – BORROW to finance – the failure to follow U. S. law?  How can the Congress be a party to FAVORING illegal aliens over U. S. citizens?  Who, after all and in fact, does every sworn Member of the Congress of the United States of America work for and get paid by?  By LAW?

The weakest President in Prudence’ lifetime has bested one of the weakest Speakers – excepting Paul Ryan, perhaps.  Any Patriot must wonder why he or she still supports the Republican Party?  Here is a President of very questionable electoral authority and ethics, whose only means of communication other than scripts on teleprompters, is to spin fables: outright falsehoods that spill from his untethered brain and mouth like han ds-full of nuts, too bulky to allow for chewing… or mulling slightly.  Yet, not a word about the defense of our borders, our cities, our states, our citizens… or our very economy.  Most tragically, there was nothing about reducing our debt.

One must wonder why McCarthy agreed to this charade.  Is it simply, corruptly, to retain powerful “issues” with which to campaign?  To retain power for these lowly appendages of the deep-state Swamp?  Couldn’t get rid of Majorkas?  Or Wray?  Or, Milley or Austin?

When people from “both” sides are touting Victory, you know the “compromise” is a stinking pile of crap.

Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Governance, Immigration, Politics 2023, Religion

THE NEW COLONIALISTS

Leave a comment

The world cannot continue as it is.  We Americans, like most people around the world who work for their livings, every day, quickly – automatically – adjust to, and begin to ignore, whatever significant news we’ve been pummeled with.  For us, the electricity and clean water stay “on” and we can take a shower whenever it pleases us.  Things can’t be very bad, can they?  Night comes and our homes or neighborhoods seem safe… and the electricity is still on, after all.  We wake up the next morning, the kids go to “school” and hubby goes off to work and no bombs have fallen.  Life is still good and the worries that crept in about inflation, drug abuse, China, Taiwan, Fentanyl and Ukraine… drift away.  Anyone that wants to discuss any one of those “issues” more than an hour or two later, must be a conspiracist or a radical, and quite boring.

Yet, off in the fuzzy distance, major forces are changing how the world “works.”

Once upon a time, independent countries could deal with one another on a wide spectrum from complete ignorance to invasive war.  What happened in Africa or Southeast Asia didn’t matter much to the enlightened few who lived mere cannon-shots apart.  As America took form, way, way across the daunting sea, things changed in ways unforeseen, and unplanned… or not – depends on your spiritual view.  Still, moving Judeo-Christian morals and urge to sacrifice, and the newly-developing economics and technologies to the “new” world, changed virtually every other nation’s future, for both good and bad.  The “old” world could not continue as it was.

Exploration and economics: old-worlders believed in ownership of the natural world, things like stockades, forts, fences, stone walls and armed defense of them all.  Homes and farms became permanent – at least compared to nomadic ways of life – and concentrated cities, stone fixtures defining streets, brick buildings and wheels, horses, oxen and the “tack” to harness their strength.  There shortly became a new “in” group and all others were in the “out” group and deemed “savages,” for their lack of Christian godliness… and technology.  The world could not continue as it was.

The colonial period lasted for 500 years, both good and bad… largely bad.  There are vestiges still, even as a new colonialism is preparing to take the place of nationalism and of freedom.  Communications have brought us together, but also into conflict.  It is not simply the conflict of nations, but conflict of individuals.  Powerful propaganda, as one form of colonialism, seeks and succeeds to take over our most valuable possessions: belief and morals.  Indeed, we can be led to reject even our personal selves in favor of a gender fantasy of becoming someone else.  Like the failed process of turning indigenous peoples into Europeans, attempting to change genders will create lifetimes of failure as people attempt to believe two diametrically opposed ideas simultaneously.  As belief structures, moral structures, religious structures weaken and fade, we find our governors changing laws to ENFORCE this false dichotomy onto everyone else with the vile tools of hatred for those who disagree.

Mind-addling drugs have been a tool for individual colonization for many decades, but rare until the Viet-Nam war.  Now, with fentanyl and other created chemicals, there is not only colonization of brains, but high volumes of death.  Whether live addiction is better is hard to discern.

But there is a world of colonization proceeding, also.  It’s called globalization.  If the United States allows it to happen, the concepts of individual liberty, sovereignty and free-enterprise – and of responsibility – will be as dead as doornails.  At the very time that citizens of the United States of America are most needed to defend our Constitutional way of government and of life, the purposeful lack of education about our unique role in the world, is bearing its most bitter fruits.

Our “Democrat” co-Americans, the cats’ paws of global leftism, are engineering a gross, illegal colonization of the United States, itself.  Attempting to justify an open border on “humanitarian” grounds has allowed, so far, over 6 MILLION illegal entrants to claim asylum status with virtually no limitation or follow-up by federal Border Patrol or Immigration authorities – the very “authorities” charged by law to prevent exactly what they are now forced to ignore.  Everyone in the chain of command from the President on up to the Border Patrol agent required to “process” invading hordes, is party to crimes and treason.  This is the new colonialism in the 21st century: displacement of rightful citizens as a public, global policy.

There is a legitimate, Constitutional question as to whether the federal government can impose costs upon any, let alone all, of the states and their ability to tax their citizens, including diverting STATE resources that were acquired for completely other reasons?  What legal thread allows the federal government or any President, by extra-legal executive order, to degrade the ability of a state to support and serve its own citizens?  What extra-legal authority allows the federal government to divert federal funds placed in the hands of states to administer and fulfill LAWFUL obligations, based on a Presidential executive order?

An even greater question is whether anyone except a United States Citizen is entitled to Constitutional rights and privileges?

Make no mistake, the “Free World” is being colonized by leftists with distinctly anti-American philosophies – Communists, for all intents and purposes.  We rarely hear of the “Free World” these days – it’s almost gone.  Not even the United States of America is number one in freedom any longer.  We, who used to defend freedom and exemplify it, can no longer define it except in terms of license.

In the “old days,” colonizers would appear with different tools, weapons, clothing, languages and religions.  Today?  Today they come with the very same differences… they just don’t have to travel as far, perhaps across the street or the down the halls of a school.  Do we rid ourselves of them?  Or, surrender?  So far, it’s surrender – the world cannot go on as it is.

The globalist colonizers approve of the amoral colonization of America.  Only America – the U. S. of A. – stands in the way of global Communism, yet we barely remember that to be our role in history.  The world cannot go on this way… not for long, anyway.  Of course, it will go on somehow.  But HOW is the business of all Americans – favoring Patriots, Prudence hopes.

There have always been economics, even when families were managing their own food, construction and defenses.  Aside from more elaborate ways to steal, the purposes of economic metrics are still the same, although the scale has exploded.  The United States, alone, squanders enough money to put the world economy at imminent risk.  Here we stand, on a sliver of eroding support for the Dollar, borrowing and spending faster than accounting can measure.  We should be ashamed.  We claim to represent a form of freedom and classless economics with which anyone can succeed with competence, work and integrity.  We elect our representatives democratically and send our best and bravest overseas to defend or create our model virtues while, back home, we don’t want or defend that system for ourselves!

Why would anyone take our advice?

The world cannot go on the way it is.

Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Family, Immigration, Politics 2023, Religion, Responsibility

IDENTIFYING ENMITY

Leave a comment

Secretary-General António Guterres (left) speaks with Volkan Bozkir, (Russia)
President of the UN General Assembly.

The position of the United States of America, once the beacon of hope, justice and honesty, relative to the rest of the world’s nations, has changed.  It’s not a change most Americans have hoped for or, cruelly, even anticipated – certainly not one that our erstwhile “leaders” have anticipated.  In a nutshell: our enemies have identified themselves.  None of the bribes or blandishments by which we have executed “foreign policy” are sufficient any longer.  The outright gifts to those who will be just as happy to watch our demise as grand influencers, have proven to be a waste… unappreciated largesse from our grandchildren’s grandchildren that bought, evidently, only tolerance.

Now that the Bidens have destroyed faith in our money, in our courts and in our foreign services, Americans have what might be perceived as an opportunity to stop lying to ourselves the way we’ve been lying to other nations.  Honesty is not a commodity that is banked in any quantity by our federal administrative state or by the elected trolls it maintains for our imagined benefit.  We vote and vote, hoping and praying that the latest lines spewed in campaigns are, at last, the true ones, but nothing changes very much.  The only change agent in the past 9 administrations has been hounded and vilified, attacked and threatened by the administrative state’s agents, since before he won election in 2016.

The internal and external destruction of the United States of America, has been engineered by the Communist Party of China – CCP.  The majesty and Christianity, tolerance and charity of America has been given away, diluted and stolen by even our trusted friends, neighbors and “public servants” as we’ve barely watched, so consumed are we by technology and hyper-sexuality and self-hate.  “They” have divided us against ourselves – the only way America and Americanism could have ever been defeated.  We’re still standing by the Grace of God, but our own determined effort will put an end to that.  Still, while we yet stand, we have an opportunity to make some radical decisions.

A quick and painless one, an obvious one, is to get rid of the United Nations and renounce every connection or treaty that we’ve ever honored with that den of thieves.  Kick them out of New York, out of our State Department and out of any influence in our curricula (aside from history) or our medical establishment.  We are Americans – we own this country and we can clean out this fetid closet of worms if we wake up in time.  Let China build a new set of club-houses for the International Liars’ Club to meet in.

Next, recognize who our enemies actually are and stop treating them like imminent friends whose undying friendship may be cemented by only a few billion more debt-dollars from our grandchildren’s grandchildren.  If they wish to trade with us or even enter our country, they will have to be at least courteous towards our national sovereignty and honor.  Let those who are proven friends to our nation, have advantage over other nations in terms of trade, commerce and intercourse.  Let us make mutual defense agreements with those who will commit as much to those treaties as our nation does – who will risk their citizens’ lives in our defense as we have and will in theirs.

Our international agreements should be mutually beneficial while not draining our treasury.  We’ll need some honest financial managers to replace the band of liars who operate the mis-named Federal Reserve, FDIC, Treasury Department and the IRS.  They operate as controllers of or enemies of American citizens.  Naturally, our federal budgets must be in surplus all-the-friggin’-time.  Inflation of the money supply has only limited value to AMERICAN CITIZENS, and then only in times of war or national disaster.  These do not include local hunger or personal failures or homelessness or drug addiction or unhappiness.  We’re talking only the business of the federal government, personal matters notwithstanding.

It is not the business of the federal government to house people, feed or clothe them, educate them or wipe their bottoms.  At least half of the federal departments and sub-agencies can be eliminated along with half of the work-force… to start.

It IS the business of the federal government to defend and control our borders, ports of entry and the presence of non-citizens.   Illegally residing non-citizens should be humanely rounded up and deported to their home countries, from where they can apply for visas.  Our country has allowed its past half-century of federal administrations to over-promise and over-spend to the amount of some $32 Trillion of current debt, and over $100 Trillion of future socialist obligations.  This is the same as pointing out that we have exceeded our productive surplus* over the past 60 years in order to transform other countries, provide comforts to non-productive citizens/residents of our own country, act like we are the most wealthy nation in the world, and to add numerous socialist programs for political reasons (vote-buying).  We cannot afford to live the way we have been.  We must stop borrowing and pay our loans off.  We must teach/force our citizenry to take responsibility for themselves and take that same off the back of the federal government.  The future can be one of freedom or of socialism/Communism; it can’t be both.

We need more tax-PAYERS, not more tax-TAKERS.  Currently, and since the outbreak of COVID-19 in particular, the long, slow creation of federal dependents has been operating at hyper-velocity – the dream of the Communists among us.  Sadly, we have been electing Communists to positions of influence and power in our states and in the federal government.  Part of how this could be is our hasty acceptance of people from widely diverse cultures, making them citizens and allowing them to create pockets of cultural distinction rather than assimilating them into our unique American culture.  We can identify the Communists among us by observing their disdain for that American culture.  We allow many of these weird people into our education establishment and then marvel at how differently our children treat American values.  In too many cases, our children have never learned what those values are.

Recently, 700 professors on the staff of the University of North Carolina signed a letter opposing a new requirement to include instruction in America’s founding documents and Constitution.  They feel that “academic freedom” is threatened by teaching American history.  A great university is represented by faculty who, evidently, fear the inculcation of AMERICAN values.  Perhaps their best efforts are perceived as the separation of their students from American values, should the primary and secondary schools not done an adequate job.  Maybe this explains why teachers see parents as the enemies of “education:” they might be teaching their own children the American values that teachers are committed to destroying.  America Awake!

*Productive surplus is what is available to be taxed out of payrolls and profits. 

Climate, Culture, Economics, Elections, Governance, Health Care, Politics 2023, Religion, Representation

LE MAIN GAUCHE

Leave a comment

The laziness of Americans, as opposed to the laziness of humans in general, will prove the undoing of our culture and comforts, unless there is large-scale social change.  The pieces – or parts – of the social engine that created a series of technological revolutions that placed men on the moon in 1969, are well-known, but widely disparaged.  How can a successful society turn away from what worked for it for hundreds of years – even thousands – and turn in a generation or two towards multiple paths of destruction of those same social-civil engines that made America the most attractive, envied nation in the world?  It requires intense purpose and planning.

Not long before the Eagle landed, the United States reached its highest level of living standards for the largest number of people, of all races.  John Kennedy was president at the time and it’s been downhill for the United States since then.  Social pollution had slipped into our “main” stream of progress towards the future.  The generations of World War I and the Depression had proven their rightness and righteousness by raising up the “Greatest Generation” who sacrificed lives and property to remove large elements of evil in World War II, and then rebuilding former enemies so that they might join “America” in a future of freedom, democracy and prosperity.  Unfortunately, the evils of Communism were not destroyed at the same time, instead literally encouraged through treaty and malfeasance to grow and entrench in two of the largest countries: the U.S.S.R. and China.

Communism is unalterably antithetical to the American idea and system; it is antithetical to religion, by definition, and it is contained and promoted within a mission of ridding the world of religion and individuality… two of the key engines of American success.  How is it possible that Communism could ever gain a foothold against the beautiful system and ideals of America?  Long-term, never ending planning and step-by-step erosion of values.  “Well, I’m not a Communist,” you are saying to yourself, “and there’s no way other Americans could ever fall for that crap.”  You’re only half right… on both parts of your statement.

First, how could anyone fall for Communism in the United States?  We “know” it fails to increase freedom and inevitably descends into fascist authoritarianism, controlling every aspect of life and interaction in society.  Communist nations are organized by classism and are examples of racialism of the worst sorts.  Communists of varied virulence have followed two tracks, and one is education.  Over the past 60 years, while our “representatives” have been consumed with clinging to their elected sinecures, leftists, convinced of their being so much smarter than those who “cling to their guns and Bibles” as Obama notably observed, have taken control of educational colleges and programs.  This placed leftists (Communists) in charge of certifying teachers and controlling the curricula in education degree programs.  Bit by bit our schools, mostly public, but the majority of private schools as well, have slanted curricula toward what “educators,” especially those Phd.’s who get hired as superintendents and commissioners of education, think is most “progressive.”  No one wants to be “old fashioned” else we won’t be keeping up with competing countries.

From teens and college students who got away with drugs and free sex rebellion in the 60’s and 70’s, have sprung generations of children who have been raised in “socialist” homes by parents who perceive winning as more valuable than learning, training and personal advancement.  If that means “beating” the system and protecting their offspring from the consequences of failure, then there are no limits.  College courses, themselves, have more and more quickly responded to social change and trends, first from feminism and then anti-Christianity and sexual deviance.  Today students can “major” in relatively useless study areas that have grown out of non-individuality, non-individual responsibility, communalism.  We can hear this diversion from what made us strong and resilient when “advocates” and activists describe their deep feelings and concerns for this or that “community.”

The “gay community” or the “trans community” or the “African-American community” are terms that display an inherent rejection of Americanism.  Our fundament is individual responsibility, individual success and individual failure, if that is what it takes to learn how to improve and succeed.  The quality and character of each of us Americans, is what matters… not the false groupings proto-Communists would try to have us believe exist.  Everything, good or bad, is “class-actionable” to communists.

The most destructive laziness is to allow the present circumstances to continue.

The other part of your – our – belief that we’re not Communists also is, sadly, in question.  Leftists – Democrats – love to accuse Republicans of planning to cut Social Security and Medicare.  Republicans automatically trumpet their promise to “protect Social Security and Medicare!”  What they are really saying is: “We believe in these parts of the Communist Manifesto even MORE than those Democrats who claim to care about you!”

Federal money has purchased most Americans’ philosophies.  The line between good solid American values and corrupt socialist nanny-statism is moving with almost every “omnibus” bill in Congress and every election cycle.  We are, by and large, afraid to give up Communism, now.  How can we make the case for freedom?  And, what is that case?  If most Americans are committed socialists, who is going to rally behind rolling socialism back?

Perhaps you were an obedient mask-wearing soldier in the battle against COVID-19.  Some of your compatriots are still wearing their masks, convinced, by government wisdom, of something or other.  You have thought you were protecting others and saving lives (despite all science to the contrary) and need only for our benign governors to alert you to something else that only your sacrifice can save us from… imminent destruction of the environment and our planet, for example.  “Whatever it takes,” you think to yourself, “just tell us so that we know what to do.”  Needless to say, YOU will never be called an “anti-vaxxer” like those deplorables that are constantly skeptical of what is necessary to save us, all.  Many of them probably attended Trump’s speech on January 6th, 2021.  You don’t need to convert to Communism, the Communists are perfectly happy with you as you are: malleable and far removed from individuality. No trouble.

Now, to save the planet, we are instructed, American success must be stifled.  Americans use too much energy, eat too much food, consume too much health care, drive too many miles, invent too much.  Maybe if we legalized extra-strong marijuana, dumbed down our education, shifted our university education towards social confusion and division, spent time and money on transgenderism in the military… perhaps then we can make progress towards snuffing out that damned American energy and genius.  Individualists will never kneel down for global government so let’s force Americans to divide against one another.  Students must be encouraged to foreswear their responsibilities by pretending to be the opposite sex – it’s a good way to divorce them from their meddlesome parents, as well.  We can’t have parents inculcating their offspring with religious beliefs and hard-work ethics.  All that pro-American stuff must be watered down.

So who are the “we” making all these plans?  Why they’re our elected and appointed federal and state officials!  We, the people, put these communist-socialists into power over us!  We, the people, largely ignorant of our responsibilities as U. S. citizens, have agreed with the hateful divisions that have popped up everywhere with the appearance of COVID.  Leftists have been rubbing raw the feelings of many blacks, mainly those who have failed to excel after generations of welfare dependency, failed education and inner-city criminality.  Institutionalized failure under federal “programs” have rewarded “community activists” for agitating a restive sub-group.  Leftists have worked for years to forgive the somehow-justified hatred for “white” culture, even when it expressed in riots, murders, looting and arson.  All that has been needed is an “unjustified” death at the hands of white police personnel – and not always “white” – any police.  A few communists, a few hired-to-be-incompetent district attorneys, and almost any tragedy can be turned into a society-ripping weapon against America.  If you think the anger and destruction is justified: the “Saint George Floyd” effect, then the committed communists and globalists (same people) are perfectly happy with you.  Their plans to remove the U. S. of A. as a stumbling block to globalism, are working better than well.

There’s always the next election, of course, when we can vote in some true patriots who will correct the problems the federal government creates for us.  That might be a plan if we hadn’t acquiesced to wholesale weakening of election laws and voting regulations slowly for decades, then in a rushing flood under COVID.  Every one of us must be vigilant in our states and question every regulation for voting that has been promulgated since March of 2020.

Communists and other leftists LOVE democracy.  All that voting… all those ballots… people can be persuaded to believe they are in control and making real choices.  One can observe that the largest “democracies” have nearly universal voter participation and, interestingly, nearly universal approval of one candidate.  How wonderful.  Even not-so-large “democracies” where some hapless opponent(s) of the approved candidate(s) find that the approved candidate still manages to eke out a win after ALL votes are counted.  This means ALL ballots are counted, not actual votes, but ballots.  As the great democrat, Josef Stalin opined, the people who count the votes are more important.  Clearly that has become the byword for leftists and capital-D Democrats in the United States: the purpose of an election is power – not democracy, not strengthening our republic, not expanding citizen participation… power.  And, since that is the true purpose, whatever it takes to realize that goal is justifiable.

After all, whenever leftists slip up and a Republican gains power, he or she is merely an interloper to be tolerated until power is restored to its rightful owners.  It is time, fellow citizens, to restore honesty in government – all three branches and the elections that create them.  Maybe a candidate will run on a platform of honesty and truth-telling to his or her constituents… ummm, naah.

We could ask, though.  If you’d like to make a candidate squirm, ask if he or she will adopt honesty and truth-telling as his or her platform, promising to tell the truth about government to constituents… to people like, well, you?  You won’t be able to keep up with the semi-true and misleading replies that question elicits.  Should that person take office, Prudence predicts that the answers he or she might offer, should you ask, will become less and more tenuously connected to truth.  Finally, “our” representative become a representative of the government TO us.  That is when we ought to know that it’s time to replace him or her with someone new.  Otherwise that sickly-sweet candy shell with the intensely bitter center, known as Communism, will win.

Biden, Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Family, Politics 2023, Religion, Responsibility, Sex

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 5

Leave a comment

The importance of being vigilant

SEXUALITY

For some weird reasons: forms of moral communism, basically, sexuality has become a major element of elementary education and the business of thousands of men and women formerly respected as educators.  One wonders why there has been a virtual explosion of sexual deviance and why America tolerates it, let alone cements it in place with illogical legal protections.  The so-called LGBTQ+ “community” has shifted from seeking safety and tolerance to rabid dominance of culture and communications, and a legally enforced “right” to convert children to deviance in schools and elsewhere.  This abrupt, new trend is a sign of sickness in a culture.

Normalization of homosexuality was the beginning to a societal tolerance of deviant sexuality, but by itself, neither virulent nor threatening to our core morality.  Gay marriage, however, provided the breech in legality such that virulent deviance could force itself upon schools, society and families.  Proto-Communists in the schools and teachers’ unions, perceived gender confusion as an excellent tool for dividing society and weakening families: a key process to create totalitarian control of society.  How diabolically clever to choose as an “enemy” the widespread grasp of truth.  What is the most damaging effect of this subversion?

To answer that we need to establish some moral – and spiritual – ground rules.  It seems Prudent to reflect on life, itself.  It is fundamentally spiritual, in the majoritarian worldwide view.  There are too many “miraculous” events, large and small, that define, save and divert the lives of too many people to attribute everything to “luck.”  Even cultures that place great emphasis on “luck” are dependent on something “spiritual” – forms of super-natural forces. 

At the same time as “spiritual” beliefs or assumptions are at work, society, itself, must function for the maximum number of people.  That means food, safety, comfort, property and advancement.  All require stability and widespread agreement on rights and wrongs: ethics, courtesies and laws.  People had to cooperate in trusted and trusting ways.  The integrity and primacy of family units are essential, as are the education and acculturation of children.  Those who would disrupt – to the point of replacing the structure and strengths of – a successful society, recognize that disrupting families is the first and most effective step.  To some significant degree, those are people who are anti-spiritual, and in the case of America, anti-Christian in virulent ways.

Human sexuality, in nearly all family units, represents the creation of children, who are the descendants of that family line.  Grandparents are as keenly interested in that process as parents are.  Whatever interferes with conception, childbirth and acculturation of children, is striking at the essence of social success and of hope… for the future, one of those “spiritual” aspects of life.  To the disrupters, sexuality, in the soup of hypersexualization of “Western” civilization, became a weapon against American culture.

“Gay” marriage was a move spurred by compassion.  Once it had legal status, aggressive sex-weaponizers had a basis for demanding equal status in school settings: homosexuality now had to be taught along with heterosexuality, and not just about marriage.  Heterosexuality is – and always has been – normalcy: mothers and fathers produce children; boys and girls are different in “normal,” predictable ways; growing up takes place in predictable, “normal” patterns with predictable responsibilities, that ought to respond to parental and societal expectations.  The boundaries of ethics and law are equally recognized and predictable.  Progress occurs as does advancement, in that individuals become more skilled, more valuable in the economies of families and communities… and nations, and more spiritual.  Those formulas of cultural success are resilient, but only to a point.  Feminism, a re-ordering of relationships between men and women, perhaps inadvertently, provided political power to legalize increasingly non-normal sexual practices.  Gay marriage had opened the door a crack while a giant wedge of divisive realignment was poised, in the form of radical feminism, to jam it open to every form of deviant irresponsibility.  Our culture has, so far, failed to recognize the danger lurking within the virulent move to get children to renounce their true selves – basically denying responsibilities inherent in their genders and roles in a healthy society.  “Affirming” mental incongruities as more true than reality, has a very, very low rate of success.  The web of lies we call “laws,” should be unraveled.

ELECTIONS

The majesty of United States’ citizenship is taught – if taught at all – through detraction and condemnation.  Rare are the public, unionized schools where a deep understanding is gained by students, of the responsibilities imparted by our Constitution, Declaration and multiple other founding and originating documents and philosophies.  Freedom is not a gift from our forefathers, except as a door to the future that we, American citizens are obligated to pass through as leaders for this world.  We have the keys to progress, advancement and personal perfection in our hands; we have failed to implant it in the hearts of our children.  For most of us, the closest we come to that responsibility is in our role as voters – authorized choosers of America’s leadership, authorized lenders of power to those we choose to hold it.  That fundamental authority and power has been so corrupted as to be taken from us BY THE VERY PEOPLE we lend our nation’s representative powers to!

Some functions of democracy should not be computerized.  The stealing of elections has become virtually part of the background humor of the United States, and it’s a part of history, most especially in large cities.  The holding of public office in cities can, if manipulated successfully, provide great wealth and power over others.  Those positions will be defended and fought-for.  The rot of urban election theft has morphed, thanks to the mysterious wonders of computerized vote recording and tallying, into the theft of statewide and federal elections.

Voter lists are computerized and the printouts of those lists are available to official campaigns.  So, too, are lists of deceased or moved-away voters, and those who are ineligible for other reasons.  Fortunately for those who are willing to defraud the voting process, most of the ineligible voters are still listed among the names on the “voter” list.  A moderately sly campaign functionary can arrange for persons to go to the polls and vote in the name of ineligible, but still listed, voters.  It works, but is time consuming and risky.  How fabulous to have a “pandemic” strike the nation during a federal election year!  Resulting fears and medical ignorance (and mendacity) overrode legal and Constitutional strictures, enabling even more sly attorneys to win court cases allowing for “mail-in” ballots to “protect” voters from the scourge of COVID-19.

These mostly illegal changes under cover of a “national medical emergency,” were quickly stretched to allow ballot drop-boxes, official and unofficial, and then vote-harvesting from infirm voters, ostensibly.  Sympathetic election officials allowed ever wider interpretations of “safety” and “every vote should count,” which included every ballot – licit and illicit.  A handful of determined election fraudsters in mail-in states could, because of fellow-democrat fellow-travelers, sway tens and hundreds of thousands of invalid, but counted, “votes.” Even signature-match verification was disregarded in the interest of safety during a national medical emergency.  Computers helped, of course, providing unmonitored curing of “erroneous” ballots with new electronic records.  Damn the whole process.

Voting is the only sacrament in democracy.  We have allowed one party, basically, to corrupt voting and vote-counting to its benefit.  In 2020 these factors may have accounted for more than 8 million illicit votes.  It changed history and the resulting President is changing history more every day… not in good ways, at all.

How can this Jin be pushed back into its cave?  How can every election be trusted again?  What are the steps?  It requires a certain amount of automation, but no actual computerization and no internet connections to aggregation points or to state elections offices or to anywhere else.

First, hand-marked ballots, only.  Fill in the ovals or squares and let a machine scan them and count them.  A total is reported for each office.  Count the handful of write-ins, and pack up the ballots with a bar-coded wrapper.  A certified police officer transports that bundle to the single aggregation point near the state capitol.  There, that bundle is unwrapped and fed through a certified machine identical to the one in East Podunk that generated the draft, on-site total.  The stack is run through the second machine and the totals compared.  If they are exactly alike, the total is reported as final.

If the totals don’t agree the ballots are inspected by hand while monitored by poll watchers.  The stack is scanned again in a free-standing, non-networked machine.  At some point there will be two identical totals and that number is reported.  The total time to complete these steps might be 2 or 3 days, but the totals will be trustworthy.  Everything else that has been interjected into this process is bogus and serves only the convenience of government – and the purposes of the leftist party.  Absentee ballots should be only that, with significant reasons to avoid personally casting one’s ballot.

There should be no “early” voting, except, perhaps, for 2 or 3 days.  That will facilitate convenience without encouraging voting in ignorance of much of what might be exposed by the campaigns.  If the Post Office is to be involved in any significant way it should be to deliver registered ballots that must be signed-for by the requestor.  Then, ON A SPECIFIC DAY prior to Election Day, and involving no mail delivery on that day – perhaps a Saturday – Postal route personnel can pick up the ballots at the addresses to which they were delivered.  No wholesale mailings to untrustworthy “voting lists” and no ballot harvesting.

If we fail to secure our elections we fail to deserve the blessings of liberty.

BUDGETS

The term, “Budget” is not used in the Constitution.  Budgeting for government spending, however, is vitally important – it’s the only way to set a standard for the key functions of the Congress: raising revenue and appropriating it for legitimate government expenditures.  There are thousands of words in the U. S. Code relating to the President’s obligations to provide dozens of kinds and titles of data about programs and expenditures included in the President’s submitted budget.  Sadly, about three-quarters of “the budget” is considered permanent or “entitlements” or both at once, and therefore unchangeable by the people’s representatives, despite having been created by those same worthies on behalf of those same people.  Technically, EVERY element in the budget may be modified or removed.  However, virtually every aspect of federal expenditure has its own advocacy group, mostly political.  With Congress’ primary purposes being re-election and not the “people’s business,” no part of the budget that could have a negative impact politically, will be touched, except to increase it.

With a $32 Trillion federal debt, a large fraction of the sub-chapters of the budget must be “touched,” cut or eliminated.  They cannot all grow in every budget cycle, including payrolls, welfare entitlements pensions and other hot-button items.  There is no reason to expect that the Congress as constituted and elected, is going to ever balance expenditures and revenues, let alone cut any one of them.  The collapse of the U. S. economically is being led and accelerated by government debt and deficit spending.  All processes of taxation and revenue accumulation have failed to enhance America’s economic strength of freedom, nor has it done very much to increase the prosperity of a majority of Americans.  We feel like we’re becoming more wealthy, higher real estate prices and so forth, perhaps larger retirement funds, but our money is worth less every year and a lot of what we think we’ve gained is “balanced” by those trillions in debt.  Most of us will not be ready when the decline becomes a rout.

Our wonderful – magical – Federal Reserve Bank was given vital power by Congress in 1913: to coin money and set the value thereof.  Along with that sloughing off of Constitutional power, Congress also provided “the Fed” the magical power to loan money to the federal government, even when it doesn’t have money to actually lend.  So, it lends air and charges interest on it.  The federal government owes so much that it must borrow money to pay the interest on previous loans.  That amounts to three-quarters of a trillion dollars this year.  Only the most irresponsible presidential administration would run a greater-than-Trillion-dollar deficit in its budget in the face of this unprecedented indebtedness.

The history of the past 60 years has made the budget process of the U. S. federal government, an increasingly fraudulent exercise.  The fraud is perpetrated upon the American people, in the main, but also on every holder of dollars in the world, as the value of each dollar slips downward, year by year… sometimes week-by-week.

Prudence would dictate a different course for our ship of state, but we won’t see that happen under Democrat control of the White House.

And we’re still not done?

Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Immigration, Politics 2023, Responsibility

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 4

Leave a comment

How we deal with national problems need not, in all cases, be nationally.  A large fraction of our national weakness has resulted from the least-efficient mechanism in the country – and the most expensive – the federal Government in its thousands of permutations, assuming responsibility for local and intensely personal problems and discomforts.  These would include things like food, education, employment, housing, and sexuality… not to mention the nature of household appliances and pronouns.  We are becoming weaker as a people and weaker individually, as we wait for unrelated bureaucrats and disingenuous politicians to make us comfortable.  Only in the past 30 years, or so, have we begun to recognize that every bit of comfort has come at a loss of freedom.  Let’s move forward.

IMMIGRATION

Every nation must deal with immigration.  It’s an outgrowth of the “greener-grass” syndrome.  People in many countries live in economic and political systems that are pretty crappy.  Often there isn’t enough food or the government is mean to people.  Many of those countries are led by dictators or communists of various shades of red, leaving the residents not very happy.  Eventually some of those people do what it takes to move to some other country where the political and economic “grass” is greener… or prettier… or less crowded.  All countries, including those that people leave, have laws – or fences – to control entry, which means not crossing their border until or unless the new country actually thinks it might be good to let the foreigner across that border.  Every country does this: controls and guards its border, mainly because one never knows when a foreigner might try to steal from the new country or from its people or, worse, try to do harm to the new country or to its people.

So, every country on Earth controls its borders, umm… except for one: Ours, the U. S. of A.  Interestingly, ours is one of the freest and the most blessed with food and blessed with the idiocy of perpetual welfare.  How would a relatively modern, successful country like ours, ever select a leader who would not defend its borders?  It is a conundrum.  Our current leader, chosen according to legend by 80 Million of his fellow citizens, has actively subverted the laws – and the fences – of his country resulting in the unbridled entry of more than 5 Million strangers from 100 other countries (or more), a million of whom sidestepped the polite greetings of the so-called “Border patrol” staff so that they could enter in secret, perhaps with less than honorable intentions toward their new country.  What an odd “leader” our country is entrusted to.

Let us hope every voter with the opportunity is able to choose a far, far different leader so that our country’s border will again be protected and guarded.  It’s a simple thing.

DRUGS

Drugs can heal or injure or kill.  These 3 options are true for both licit and illicit drugs.  In concert with the problems of immigration, tons of illicit drugs cross the unguarded border we just discussed, and they definitely injure and kill the legal residents of this country.  Our erstwhile government, hired to protect us, the citizens, has failed to solve the problem of mind-altering and often deadly drugs for, well, virtually forever.  But, under current leadership and the inactions of our bureaucratic “deep state,” the swath of death such drugs have wrought has reached new depths of death and failure.  One wonders why this particular national problem has proven insoluble.  Our national government reflexively tries to force the solution to deadly, destructive drugs back upon individuals and localities, while grasping onto personal problems that earn votes and the continuation in power to make them national ones.  Someone is not being honest with the citizenry.

Over the span of 9 years or more, America sacrificed about 55,000 of its young men and women fighting Communists in Viet-Nam.  We have agonized over the waste of those young people for the 50-plus years since we pulled out.  Lots of lies and untruths were told to the American people during that botched conflict, yet we persevered until there was nothing left to fight for, and we left.

Drugs kill between 60,000 and 100,000 young people EVERY DAMNED YEAR nowadays – mostly due to fentanyl that comes through Mexico, our “friends” to the south.  The victims don’t need the Defense Department to ship them overseas to be killed; overdosing can be accomplished close to home… sometimes in the home. 

Fentanyl is fairly easy to make from its constituent chemicals, benzylfentanyl and 4-anilinopiperidine and our other “friends,” Communist China sells large quantities of those chemicals to Mexican cartels.  Toluene, an easy chemical to obtain, they don’t need to import.  “Fentanyl” is 100 times as potent as morphine in its ability to react with pleasure receptors in the brain, so a user must be very, very careful as to dosage.  Its other effect is suppression of breathing, and a user certainly wouldn’t want to end up like George Floyd, late of Minneapolis.  A deadly dose, even for a man as big as the late Mr. Floyd, is about the volume of one shake of salt on some food – very, very careful.  Unfortunately, most users of drugs, particularly drugs of questionable origin, are somewhat stupid.  Tens of thousands smarten up every year, right before they stop breathing.

A president, especially one elected due to his immense popularity with some 80 Million of his fellow citizens, would go out of his way, at least a little bit, to guarantee that they or their offspring would be safe from the ravages of illicit drugs like fentanyl.  It’s the least he could do for the millions of people who loved him so much, once.  It turns out that that President is more enamored of the one-point-something Billion friends he has in China, dwarfing the paltry crowd who “voted” him in.  So, he has done less than nothing to stop the flow of illegal drugs or illegal aliens across our once-guarded border.  Indeed, his actions have facilitated both of those illegal border-crossings, and here we are.  Parents and lovers who are mourning the loss of loved-ones to fentanyl and other “southern” drugs, are advised to never forget who their President cares about least.

Drugs could be stopped, but not one plea-bargained case at a time.                                               (See: https://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/05/15/drugs-and-governance/)

It would be refreshing to hear a campaign speech that included the protection of the American people as a key promise.  It would elicit many Prudent votes, particularly if the death penalty were revived for drug distributors.

MEDICINE & FREEDOM

Recently, as in 3 years ago, a “new” coronavirus swept across the planet.  A lot of people died as a result, but not always from that virus, COVID-19.  We’ve talked about this, but the virus is not the biggest damage-causer.  The presence of COVID yielded a massive loss of rights and freedoms – un-Constitutionally – and changed the relationships among individuals, health-care providers and institutions, and changed the relationship between the federal government and individuals.  We who are plagued with short memories, owe it to ourselves and to our descendants, to keep alive the abuses Americans have been subjected to and why the new relationships must be reversed in law.  Lately we have heard the CDC and the NIAID branch of it, try to walk back the directives they issued during the “pandemic” that cost many their jobs, licenses and even lives.  Governors, school systems, public agencies, even branches of the military created executive authorities and powers to direct the actions of individuals because they were “following CDC guidance” or “following the science” as imaginatively defined by people like Dr. Anthony Fauci who claimed to “represent” science.  People like to think that “doctors,” including Phd’s, are “scientists,” but many are followers of others.  For medical doctors, with the brutal intrusion of federal governance into health care, many are employees, now, and they can be fired by the institutions that they turned to for stability and protection, if they don’t kow and tow.

Police and fire departments forced trained members to accept the experimental injections or lose their jobs; military branches forced members to accept the shots or lose their position, despite the investment in training and skills.  Teachers were forced to accept the experimental chemical injections on the same basis.  People were forced to get the injections or forego normal exercise of their rights of movement,  assembly or commerce.  Almost none of what was imposed on us, free, sovereign, Americans, was Constitutional.  Those who were questioned on these actions used various claims of ignorance by citing the “CDC” advisories as their authority to restrict freedoms.  Ostensibly, thanks to active fear-mongering by government entities, that same CDC and NIAID (Fauci) and ignorant media (to the point of marshalling hatred against those who disagreed with the fear… mixing it all up with “racism,” lack of “equity” and even “white supremacy” as reasons that people questioned “the science”) COVID was such a threat that states of emergency were justified and people could be arrested or economically destroyed for opening their businesses.

To be Prudent, most of “science” touted during the dark medical age of 2020 through 2022, was bogus.  Real science was often put forth and literally suppressed by government and media working together to protect a single narrative, and those actions killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Americans who would have survived COVID relatively easily had less harmful treatments been allowed early in their infections.  In some cases, those alternative treatments worked in very late stages of infection, but it took a contentious legal battle to obtain them.  Hundreds of thousands.

Science is not a place or even a consensus, it is a process.  Stopping investigation, data analysis and experimentation by claiming “settled science” or similar baloney, is as anti-science as can be.  That’s what the “great” Anthony Fauci represented throughout.  The entire National Institutes of Health – NIH – should be disassembled and reconstituted in a way that will improve health and longevity, not the bottom lines of pharmaceutical companies.

The only legitimate role of government in our democratic Republic is to be a partner in the health, safety, advancement and prosperity of its citizens.  Consider what it is, in fact today, and recognize why Prudence indicates that these should be revolutionary times.

DOLLARS

The world is awash in dollars including the trillions we create through productive enterprise in our own economy, those we create through productive enterprise in other countries, the “air-dollars” the FED creates for us at re-election times, and the dollars created by foreign banks and enterprises.  Lots and lots of dollars.  The “air-dollars” have been tolerated by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations (OPEC being largely a creation of Henry Kissinger and the American oil industry) and nearly every other nation in the world since Nixon closed the “Gold Window” of the Treasury in 1973.  Simultaneously we guaranteed to protect Saudi Arabia and its oil markets and they agreed to market oil only in dollar denominations.  People who wanted oil, and many other traded products, were happy to accept dollars in payment and just as often would sell their goods in terms of dollar values rather than their own currencies.  The need to maintain “exchange rates” with all other currencies and the dollar, gave rise to incredibly lucrative currency speculations that have been not only a financial lever but a political one, as George Soros and others can testify.  So many dollars.  Every one is a bill – a bill against American productivity, and each must eventually be paid with something valued by the holder.

Many in power today seem to view the ocean of dollars as something that will be tolerated forever, and, further, that our incomprehensible debt – over 32 Trillion, now – can be “mentalized” as opposed to monetized.  That is, we will eventually be able to talk our debtors out of worrying about it or even wanting it paid back.  Without grasping what their attitude means, many people just roll their eyes when asked about how we will ever deal with our national debt?  Since it can’t be dealt with now, the best thing is to not let it worry us too awfully much, and let someone worry about it in the future.  Apparently, since we have made ours the largest single element of worldwide debt, all other nations should realize that if our debts are called the world will be worse off without an independent United States… so there: deal with it.  That’s some convenient mentalizing, but it’s not likely to work.

Until 10 or 15 years ago, the majority of nations accepted the dominance of the dollar as a trade-off for stability and extensive military aid from the U.S. to the more than 150 nations in which Americans were posted to protect or stabilize smaller countries facing politically crappy enemies.  Militarily, the U.S. had established a global empire that benefitted itself in both trade and influence, yet also cost it more than its own productivity could afford, hence the enormous debt being tolerated.  But tolerance isn’t love.  There was and is nothing about our past relationships that will inhibit smaller countries from accepting “help” from Communist China, our sworn enemy.  Part of China’s all-dimensional war against the U.S. is the unseating of the dollar as the global currency of trade.  If we lose the “petro-dollar” advantage other nations will quickly decide to not accept payments of international trade obligations in dollars.  One hopes that some one of the geniuses who brought us to this point of astronomical debt, is working on how the U.S. of A. is going to survive as an independent entity without the petro-dollar economy to sustain it.  Voters should ask politicians this question.

Fellow Prudentialists will appreciate the growing, unique responsibilities of U.S. citizenship, ignored or un-taught only at our peril.  Let’s move further.

Economics, Elections, Governance, Obama, Politics 2023, Representation

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 3

Leave a comment

Progress toward exposing problems we face has been impPrudently slow… and there are so many.  They are interrelated, but it is far too complex to discuss them all at once.  Let’s move forward.

UNIONIZATION

There are valid reasons for otherwise independent, sovereign individuals to put their futures and ability be productive into he hands of others who may or may not share their best interests.  Usually those reasons are related to bad management decisions, but unionism has devolved into monopoly labor, and it’s just as flawed as monopoly capitalism.  The private sector has largely rejected unionism; monopoly labor primarily exists in the “public” sector – government financed and managed work.  The reason for this phenomenon, the dirtiest possible, is the value of rewarding an army of political, re-election workers, be they in construction, policing, firefighting, plumbing, paving or bus-driving.

Most are good people.  It’s never a question of individual people, it’s the power held by a relative few of them who purport to “represent” their membership in obtaining more “fairness” in pay and work rules.  The process of keeping power for union leaders lies in politicians having voted for legal status for unions; it lies in “public” contracting and public employment being required to be unionized.  The unions, as a result these legal requirements, also are obligated to “negotiate” with the same politicians who granted them power and for whom they work at election times.  It is a game in which the politicians always lose when representing “the public” – taxpayers – in determining how much to pay the members of the unions.  On the other hand, the politicians, left mostly, but also many on the right, who “fight” for “working families” usually win on the re-election side of the board.  “Working families” are always union families, and the “fight” is always to pay them more.

It didn’t take long for what union members were paid became the “prevailing wage” and the rate that anyone doing business with town, state or federal governments had to pay in order to bid on “public” contracts.  Unlike business and labor and expenditures in the (dreaded) private sector where all the productive surplus that pays for every public expenditure is earned, virtually no one who negotiates for the “public” represents the interests of the public… not really.  Elected officials who win election and re-election by promising to “fight for working families and the ‘middle class’” only fight to keep things as they are, reliably in favor of government, always at higher pay.

If a single change could be made that was “fair” for every American, it would be for every state to be a right-to-work state with no favoritism in public contracting for unionized companies.  For contractors who could show superior results from their unionized workforce, they would rightly win their share of “public” projects.  Non-union contractors who could show the same, would win theirs.  Until that day, the slope will remain downward, always at higher pay.

 A sad example of the downside of legally sanctioned unionization is the death and destruction that followed the death of George Floyd in 2020.  “Oh, come now Prudence… you’re off the rails with that one,” you might be thinking.  But, you’re looking at the wrong end of the whole sequence.  The man who was convicted for the manslaughter of Floyd before his body was cold, Officer Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department, was a dues-paying member of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis.  That union had no role in his trial relative to George Floyd, but it had protected Chauvin multiple times relative to complaints about his use of force while an active officer, of which there were many – more than 15.  Chances are that Chauvin ought to have been separated from the police department long before he restrained George Floyd.  He had demonstrated a tendency to use force to restrain detainees past the point when force was needed.  The Federation had argued for him in every case, saving his job.  That’s what unions do and a large part of why members pay union dues.

EDUCATION

One of the worst examples of public employee unionization is teachers’ unions – not teachers… teachers’ unions.  Their stranglehold on public policy and purse strings was made clear during the 3 years’ of COVID-19 fear-mongering.  The damage to children and to actual education itself, is nearly immeasurable, the money wasted to appease teacher unions during COVID, is outrageous.  Even the supposed scientists at the CDC were taking orders from the Federation of Teachers as to whether schools could open again or kids stop wearing masks – science be damned.  Teachers pretended to “teach” remotely while students pretended to “learn” from their computer screens.  But, no one learned from the “science” everyone claimed to be following, including the CDC and the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases: guardians of “the science,” every one.  And that’s another post.

Observers of things educational estimate that kids were set back one to two years of development and learning under the COVID regime.  Despite the uselessness of face masks and the increasing understanding of the damage they do to development of the youngest school-children, including socialization and speech and comprehension skills, some school systems, largely pushed by unions, still wanted to mask children at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year!  Because of fear of catching COVID?  Ridiculous.  These are the people we trust to impart knowledge to our children – knowledge that is supposed to prepare them to think on their own, resolve problems and conflicts and to prepare for adulthood.  Yet many school teachers and school committees seem Hell-bent on denying the children with whom they are entrusted for five days a week, a fair chance at growing up intact.  What are we doing?  What are they doing?  What in every matter of education should educators consider their mission and success to be?  Confuse kids about their sexual outlook or fantasy?  Convince kids that their skin color is more important than their abilities to apply themselves?

People who don’t lie to themselves and others about human nature – like socialists and Communists do – will say “No” to those last two questions.

BANKS & ECONOMICS

People whom we pay excessively to “manage” our finances, the money supply and economic growth, appear to not have as deep an understanding as we assume when justifying their exalted pay and position.  They are evidently even more ignorant of the majesty of freedom and individual sovereignty; money and freedom are inextricable, after all.  The foolhardy actions of the “Biden” administration, following on the heels of the largely mendacious “COVID Pandemic,” and the deadly inflation that results, illustrate all too clearly the lack of intelligence being applied to economics… and to governance, itself.

Amidst the jungle of banking, finance and investment regulations that have grown up since the Great Depression, a basic truth has been lost within government, itself – including Congress – and among the people of the United States.  Now, with communistic theories being applied thither and yon, we are approaching the cliff’s edge of economic collapse while a crowd of chowderheads is enthralled with its legislative “victories” in the first two years of the Biden regime, basic truth be damned.  And, what truth is this?  Inflation is the result of government actions.  It is not a virus that attacks without warning, or the result of too much exuberance by free people and enterprise.  It refers only to the money (actually, “currency”), supply, something for which the unholy alliance between government and the Federal Reserve are entirely responsible.  Rising prices are not inflation, although inflation results in prices rising.  Inflation (and this is why it is often employed as a matter of policy) reduces the value of currency, both in tangible form and in electronic accounts.  In the short term, it enables government to pay its debts more cheaply, but it also steals from every private person and family, savings and retirement account.  Inflation is a thief unleashed upon the population by government.

Lately, the secretive, highly regulated, yet poorly regulated banking industry, has been shaken to its boots by the severe inflation ignited by the pandemic and the wild, unneeded deficit spending of the Biden administration.  The Federal Reserve Board assumes as part of its role, that it must regulate the money supply, ostensibly to limit inflation.  Contra-indicated is its other assumed role: controlling (limiting) unemployment.  Controlling inflation comes first, always, since the health of the financial/banking system relies on stable rates of inflation and of interest.  In the world of mortgages and large-asset financing and leasing, interest rates – the cost of money over time – needs to be stable or growing very slowly.  Abrupt acceleration in the rate of inflation disturbs both long and short-term financing and, ironically, the availability of cash for daily economic function.  Banks have failed in the past two weeks and other banks are scrambling to save weakened banks.  Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen has repeatedly assured the public and Congress that “the banks” are safe and that depositors will be able to obtain their money when needed.  America’s Gramma Yellen looks so friendly.  She expects to bring our total debt to 50,000,000,000,000 dollars.  That is a difficult number to grasp – maybe FIFTY FRIGGIN’ TRILLION is easier to conceive of.  Her calming words consist of the possibility that the total cost of INTEREST(!) will be a certain relatively small percentage of GROSS FRIGGIN’ DOMESTIC PRODUCT!

Yellen is a committed Keynesian economist, which is to say that she believes in deficit spending as a matter of policy and appropriate government action/response to financial OR social anomalies.  This belief blends in with the socialist view that any problem brought to government’s attention, must be resolved by government action.  “Deficit” spending also fits the modus operandi of the Federal Reserve, itself, since it is enabled by law to lend money to the government that it – the Fed – does not have!  What could go wrong?

Deficit spending, itself, is premised on the vast majority of the population being ignorant of the possible effects of it.  That is, so long as “people” (voters) don’t understand what government is doing to them (“for them” in theory), and it is primarily economic “doing,” the government can do what is good for government and keep voters occupied with a host of social issues, angers, unfairness-es, and fundamentally local grievances.  With enough words in favor of this or that response to these non-federal (non-Constitutional) issues, Congressmen and women and Senators, many of whom don’t understand economics much, either, can keep getting re-elected.  The permanent government and the “experts,” like Yellen, who slide into and out of powerful federal positions, can maintain the direction they want government to go, regardless of the wishes of the citizenry whose power they actually exercise.  Janet Yellen has been influential or powerful in the economic direction of the federal government for three decades – first as one of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors in the mid ‘90’s, then as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for Bill Clinton for two years.  Barack Obama named her Chair of the Federal Reserve – technically a private consortium of banks, not Federal, in fact.  Joe Biden chose her for Treasury Secretary, likely as he chose many of the key people from the Obama Administration: at Obama’s direction.

Despite supposedly favoring low unemployment over inflation control, Yellen has argued for continued “stimulus” during the pandemic, and for higher taxes and lower “retirement” spending to deal with the national debt.  Republicans are routinely lied-about at any suggestion of reducing Social Security or Medicare expenditures like what Janet Yellen suggested.  Doesn’t matter, so long as she is happy to enable and promote Keynesian deficits in the face of “crises,” socialists will be happy to take her advice.

We are in trouble.  Stay tuned for more ways to Prudently analyze or resolve the problems we face.

Climate, Crime, Culture, Economics, Elections, Governance, Politics 2023

BEING A LONG SHORTLY – 1

Leave a comment

How do we screw up?  Let us count the ways.  To take a clear look we need, first, to LIST all the ways the United States is, well, doing the wrong thing.  It’s a little difficult to determine which errors are in reaction to the actions of others, and which are proactive attempts to change America’s direction, both domestically and internationally.  It will take more than one post to cover all those we can list.  Where to start?

America is not functioning the way it did when we were the strongest, most free and most prosperous nation, a beacon of freedom and opportunity.  The single, most potent disrupter and destroyer of “the American way” is and has been, socialism and then Marxism.  It would be useful if we could simply mount a campaign to “say no to Marxism,” and scrub it from the public mentality.  Unfortunately, and criminally, its perverse pervasion amidst so many of our institutions and attitudes, politicians and civic leaders, schools, administrations and educators, and other millions of social services, workers and “charities,” makes its removal a painful, macro- and micro-scopic abrasion of every layer of society.

So, there is a list of problems in need of Americanist repair, but virtually every one of them (poor Prudence has 39, a starting number) is confused by Marxism – Communism – which is antithetical to our Constitutional Republic.  “Leaders” seem to be oblivious to its infection.

FOREIGN AID

Foreign Aid is a problem, for example, to which most Americans pay little or no attention.  It’s not a “big” number in “budgets” of hundreds and thousands of $Billions, but it is a honey-pot for some of the most questionable, if not reprehensible, governments in the world; and, it represents our political support for philosophies and actions that are the OPPOSITE of what “America” stands for.

So, “foreign aid,” this backwater line-item of expenditure, makes a patriot wonder about the meanings behind the actions of others.  And, it should cause every American to reflect on how it is that so many elected and deep-state bureaucrat “leaders” manage to gain and retain power when they are so opposed to what America stands for.  Clearly, over many years, lies are fed to American citizens and, more disturbingly, to our elected “representatives,” sufficiently to coax continued financing of those opposed to us and our way of life.  This tiny corner of our “government” shows us the nature of most of our debilitating problems.  (America, awake!)

If one were to pray to God to expose the lies being told – and the liars who tell them – then he or she would also need to pray for exposure of the truth and the tellers of truth… so that we would know who to follow.  We’d have to exercise good, thoughtful judgment.  One thing, then, that we must not overlook, is that behind or amidst every problem that we might examine: problems that threaten our Republic and the unity required under “e pluribus unum,” are lies – lies of initiation and/or lies of maintenance.  The original lie of any conspiracy or fraud, must forever be reinforced with more lies, great and minor.  If we can identify the lie, we may be able to identify the liar.  It is a key responsibility of citizenship.

Lately, and we’re looking back to World War II as the beginning of “lately,” there has developed an apparent increased density of lies emanating from “government.”  This phenomenon has been possible only thanks to a compliant – if not subservient, press.  Our Constitution protects and, in effect, promotes a “free press,” but the meaning of the term and the protection, is seriously diluted, “lately.”

In keeping with the Communist Manifesto, news has, for many outlets, become mere propaganda, justified by political and racist hatreds. Very lately we’ve learned of direct involvement by federal law-enforcement agencies with various information outlets so as to alter Americans’ understanding of the truth.  More than once, this illegal interaction has affected elections at the federal level.  Virtual Communists within our own government of, by and for the people, seem to be converting a manifesto into actions.

Communism, socialism and other far-left movements have to lie.  The truth of their ideas and beliefs is so ugly and inhuman that only a smattering of disturbed people would join or follow them if the truth of them were made clear.  As might be said of “Satan,” the use of some truth about conditions that are not perfect, and lots of sympathy for people in imperfect situations, will confuse enough people to effect a shift of power toward the left.  Later is soon enough for the confused to learn the truth of socialism-Communism.  Those who are challenged with the murderous and economic destruction of socialism-Communism will fall back on the claim that leftist governance has failed only because those who have tried it were not as smart as those, like Hillary Clinton, who hope to try it today.

So, as we look at problem areas for America, keep at the forefront of your analysis that the far left has to dissemble, distract and deflect in order to make its claim to power.  It is better to have truth as our number-one ally. 

UKRAINE

Ukraine is a problem, whether you think their defense is appropriate for them to pursue, or not.  For the record, it is Prudent for everyone to defend his or her family, home, property and country.  It is natural and logical to ask others to help in that defense.  But the Ukraine situation is not as simple as that – how they became a target of their Russian neighbor; how the United States became their main armorer; how the United States got involved with overthrowing the Ukrainian government in 2014 – the waters in Ukraine have been seriously muddied by the United States.  Russia… Putin, refers to the current Ukrainian regime as “Nazis.”  Sadly, he is remarkably close to truth in so describing.

The late, great Senator, John McCain became the public face of U.S. support for street-riot opposition to the government of Viktor Yanukovych, who had been duly elected, and who favored closer economic ties to Russia over connection to the European Union.  The U. S. favored the opposite.  The main opposition to Yanukovych came from what is called “the far right” inasmuch as national socialist oligarchs govern all that differently than Russian socialist oligarchs.  But the national socialist party, Svoboda, had descended from neo-Nazis.  During the Maidan protests (Maidan is the central plaza in Kyiv) an even more Nazi-like party, Right Group, gelled and became more violent than Svoboda, including firearms.  Hearkening back to the Nazi occupation during WW-2, many Ukrainians still perceive Nazi collaborators as heroic in helping rid the country of Soviet Communists who, under Stalin, had starved millions of Ukrainians during collectivization.  Both Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy stood shoulder to shoulder with the fascist leader of Svoboda as they promised support for the protesters.

So far, no government of Ukraine has operated without corruption and oligarchic power-brokering, keeping the rich, rich.  Russia’s primary bargaining chip to pull Ukraine eastward, was gas pricing, with Ukraine highly dependent on low gas prices from Russia.  They were deeply upset when Yanukovych rejected their final offer in favor of the EU.  Vice-President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, managed to gain a position on the Board of the Ukrainian gas company, Bourisma, immediately following the ouster of Yanukovych.  Petro Poroshenko, one of the richest men in Ukraine, became Prime Minister and merged a Neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Regiment, into the National Guard.  At the time of “The Maidan Revolution” both Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. Ambassador, and Victoria Nuland, his Assistant, were actively manipulating people and events to place the government of Ukraine on the pro-Western trajectory it claims now.  No wonder Putin is so angry.  There ARE Nazi’s in Ukraine, whom the Russians consider the descendants of Operation Barbarrossa, that killed 20 million Russians in WW-2.

We are told every day that defending Ukraine “for as long as it takes” is the same as defending democracy, which doesn’t actually exist in Ukraine – Zelensky has eliminated opposition parties.  Who are the liars in this mess that grows more dangerous with every Biden breath?  The larger question is: why would any of us vote for people who lie about Ukraine or who are too ignorant to say something true about that benighted real estate?  Helping displaced people is a totally separate question.

NORDSTREAM

The Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines should be as neutral as pipelines usually are, but these have been elevated to powder kegs by someone’s utterly stupid sabotage of them.  Given that Russia has been seeking bids to repair the pipes, the initial charge by the U.S. that Russia may have destroyed its own pipelines… makes less sense than when first postulated.  The apparent culprit is the United States, itself, and parts of that story are spilling out, most particularly in the deep reporting of Seymour Hersh.  The U. S. has pushed hard on a key economic sore point for both Russia and Europe.  Watching the gang of less-than-honest advisors and ambassadors “handle” America’s relationships with Russia, Ukraine, China, Iran and North Korea, gives a Prudent person pause and worry.  It’s almost as though war weren’t coming quickly enough, and these boobs were testing ways to hasten it along.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for the truth about the Nordstream operation from the federal government.

ENERGY

Pulling the plug on American energy production is one of the stupidest moves a federal government has ever made.  It seems inevitable that a leftist administration would be the one to attempt it.  It was known to be likely if Joe Biden became president in 2020: he campaigned on a “green” platform.  So, he has made it difficult and costly to develop oil and gas fields and bring them on line.  Doing so, along with the somewhat silly added regulations and restrictions on the uses of natural gas and refined products, has had an immeasurably small impact on the earth’s climate, if any, and probably won’t ever have more than that.  This is not to say that his destructive policies have not had AN impact.  Keeping the wealth of natural resources out of the American economy – and other economies – has lubricated the acceleration of inflation that hurts everyone while weakening the nation of the United States just as threats to the nation are the greatest they have been since the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Controlling America’s energy production and keeping its costs low strengthen’s America strategically and domestically.  Forcing more of our citizens into subsistence economics weakens the nation, and removes millions of people from the “improvement track,” where adults gain in skills and earning power – and living standards – and their expanding hope for the future encourages them to have children who can advance in skills, learning and hopefulness.  Creating economic hardship is the exact opposite of what political leaders should ever do or ignore; indeed, failing to partner in the economic advancement and safety of your citizenry, is one of the clearest marks of failure by leaders.

The ”green” agenda is founded on a number of fallacies, including our ability to modify the climate of the planet.  Politically, the green movement has as much of its impetus a newfound political, regulatory ability to PUNISH economically successful people.  The rapidity with which President Biden reversed energy policies, ostensibly to undo anything connected to Donald Trump or any of his supporters, marks his, and his leftist, “green” voters’, intense desire not to govern as partners in success, but to damage the economies of non-leftists.  It exemplifies failure.  Energy is strength and security, and it defines the scope and efficiency of an economy in a world of specialization.  To weaken energy is to weaken the economy and every citizen’s position in it.  To reduce hope in an economy is to strike at the purpose of nationhood.  For Joe Biden, it fails beyond “us versus them” in a political sense, reaching the nadir of “me versus all who question me.”

_______________________ Our problems exceed a single posting.

Crime, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Governance, Politics 2022, Religion, Representation

Constitutionally Speaking

Leave a comment
…A Republic if you can keep it.

Wise humans generally have tried to select their leaders from among those who think logically relative to the traditions and cultural mores of the society.  Those who would be leaders, but who tend to propose completely opposite ideas and beliefs at proximate times, are generally rejected for positions of leadership, and denied power over the “people” who have sought leaders who will protect their families and partner in achieving greater safety, comfort and wealth.  Along the way, their leaders are expected to protect and strengthen the children so that society will grow, be strong and continue.

In earlier times, especially when education was not widespread – mainly reserved to self-selected religious leaders and somewhat self-selected royal families – populations accepted their statuses as serfs and peasants for whom reverence of their “leaders” was how safety for themselves and their families was increased, including food security.  Things changed as education became “public.”  Wisdom and philosophies from the “ancient” past spread among millions of thoughtful humans, some of whom refined and expanded on the “pure” ideas of the Greeks, Hebrews, Romans, Persians and many others, interpreting human interactions amidst the “new” realities of economics, civic participation and independence.

Great minds eventually proscribed the foundational ideas of the United States, and they are quite simple!

Underlying the simplicity of the Constitution are principles of preventing or avoiding the proven tendencies of the worst of human nature to gain power and wealth at the expense of others: tyranny of one form or another.  Let’s consider the simple ideas and the assumptions on which they are dependent.  Our founders designed “self-government” against the backdrop of tyrannies they had seen and fought, both religious and monarchical, as well as militaristic.  They could not include tools designed to thwart the new tyrannies defined and refined by Marxism in the middle of the 19th century. That is our job, today.

The first simple idea, upon which our survival depended then and does, now: religious freedom.  Education in the late 18th century was based largely upon religious philosophies and structures of good and evil as spread by and through churches and prelates of all kinds, mostly Christian, and by locally hired teachers.  The vast majority of Americans shared basic beliefs in right and wrong as they ratified the Constitution; they never imagined that within a few generations the vast majority of Americans – AND THEIR CHURCHES – would no longer agree upon the principles of right and wrong and self-discipline.  The functioning of Constitutional republicanism depends upon “the people” being a moral, self-disciplined body politic.  To participate in and manage a republic, requires that its members – citizens – be educated in its principles and practices.  Sadly, this is no longer the case.

The second simple idea is representation.  A people who have learned to choose their representatives such that those so chosen will guard the people from the worst excesses of executive rulers, will, if properly educated, keep a civic eye on those representatives, in our case, on members of the House of Representatives.  Our Founders believed, based on a social compact within which nearly everyone shared common rights and wrongs, that representing people in the many states, would remain a mission of honor and fealty to their constituents.  They never imagined that election to Congress would become such a lucrative opportunity for personal gain, that re-election, and the many corruptions that facilitate re-election, would replace the proper role of service and honor.  “The People’s House” is no longer a place of honor but for a few.  Americans must educate themselves about the original purpose and model for representation, and MAKE THE CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGES required to restore representation to the primary purpose – and effect – of election to “The House.”

The third simple idea is states’ rights.  That is, that the Federal government is limited to those functions that states cannot do for themselves, and that the powers not granted to the Federal Government, or prohibited to it, are reserved to the states, respectively, or to the people.  Senators are supposed to represent the interests of the States; they are not supposed to be longer-serving, at-large representatives of the people.  They are supposed to be selected by the state legislatures to represent the STATES, guarding their rights and powers in a federal, not NATIONAL system of governance.  Because of the failures of some state legislatures during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, leaving Senate seats unfilled, Congress proposed the 17th Amendment and it was ratified with little delay.  Since then, 6-year-term Senators have been elected similarly to 2-year-term Representatives.  Thus were the constituencies of Senators changed from their state governments to the general populations of states, which changed the responsibilities of Senators.  Being elected “at large” means that Senate candidates have, ever since, been able to lie at varying levels of effectiveness, twisting truth and news, particularly for incumbents, to gain popular vote victories. 

If the Senator in question had to answer to members of his or her state’s legislature, men and women who, to some greater degree, know what is going on and what they instructed their Senator to do, then the re-election/appointment landscape would be far, far different than the amorphous, dishonest campaigning that works with popular-vote elections.  Prior to the 17th Amendment, states’ senators had to answer for what they did in Washington.  It would be very good to repeal the 17th and make Senators responsible to SOMEBODY.  The chance of senators being re-elected for 24, 30 or 36 years, would be much reduced: a good thing.

The fourth simple idea is equal application of the laws.  The fundament of individual sovereignty and freedom is equal STATUS under the laws.  Our Bill of Rights, without which the Constitution would have never been ratified, or even considered for ratification by some states, codifies the assumptions that underlay the debates that developed the Constitution.  Madison and others believed that having won independence from a powerful monarchy, under which laws and persecutions were applied differently to citizens deemed by the monarch to be favored or unfavored, had cemented the concepts of equal application of law into the American people.  In fact, the ability of governments of any type: elected or hereditary, to become tyrannical, was bound to color the debates.  The likelihood that executive authority will garner power not specifically granted to it, is historically likely.  Government can NEVER be trusted to control itself on behalf of even the highest principles.  The rules limiting the power of government and protecting the unalienable rights of every person, had to be part of the proposed Constitution.  Ratification was effected by legislative agreement of three-fourths of the states; the formation of a FEDERAL government was a function of the STATES and not even of popular vote.

Let’s repeat that concept: the Federal Government is a creation of the states.  The power and rights of, now, 50 STATES, are SUPERIOR to the powers of the Federal Government.  How foreign this truth sounds.  It means that criminal laws as well as civil laws, are primarily the business of states, and that federal laws should be few in number and limited in scope to matters of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and other amendments, and matters of military justice and treason.  It also means that federal police powers and the so-called “F.B.I.” should be severely limited in terms of interactions with individual citizens.  Things have changed, to say the least.

The fifth simple idea is the ELECTORAL COLLEGE, which provides a mechanism of election of the Chief Executive Officer / Commander-in-Chief, free of undue influence from Congress or from direct democracy.  Our Founders understood the inherent dangers of pure democracy and that democracy, alone, would quickly yield tyranny of shifting majorities.  This is why so many mechanisms dividing power between states and the federal system, between states and pure democracy, and between citizens and their representatives, are built into the Constitution.  Lately, many on the Left have complained about the Electoral College, always touting the “popular vote” as having favored a losing Presidential ticket.  Needless to say, the popular vote is meaningless in presidential politics.  The Electoral college makes sure that presidents are elected by the States, not by popular vote.  The U. S. holds 50 state elections for 50 slates of electors who are committed to a presidential ticket.  While electors are related to representative numbers: 2 senators per state plus the number of representatives per state, presidential tickets must win the majority of presidential electors, state by state.  Both large and small states are important to the final total.  Presidents are elected by the states, not through direct democracy.

Those who want to get rid of the Electoral College are those who want government to be empowered through pure democracy, and they are not to be trusted with real power.

Another simple idea, relative to the Executive authority, is that Congress must declare war, not the President.  Under monarchies, the monarch can dictate foreign policy and declare war when he or she doesn’t get what he or she desires.  Again, to limit the concentration of power in the executive branch, our founders anticipated that Congress’ interests would be closer to the people and rarely in complete agreement with the Chief Executive.  What was never anticipated was that both the House and Senate would be so willing to avoid responsibility for much of anything, and so willing to relinquish powers to the executive bureaucracies of unelected rule-makers, as is attractive to communists.  Like all contracts and covenants, they are only as good as the quality and integrity of the parties to them.

Our founders, likewise, never anticipated that Congress would devise a means of creating perpetually growing public debt (in the form of the extra-constitutional “Federal Reserve” Check out: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2020/09/27/knife-edge-election/).  In 1789 people – and governments – had to pay their debts before more loans would be offered; today we raise the “debt ceiling” so that we might borrow enough to pay only the interest on previous debts, let alone pay down the principals.  This results in our “representatives” failing utterly to represent the interests of the people each is paid handsomely to represent… adding annually to the peoples’ debt burden and being re-elected despite having done so.

The SUPREME COURT is a simple idea, although modern beliefs complicate it beyond reason.  The Constitution provides federal judges, including Supreme Court Justices, with lifetime appointments.  The purpose is to insulate justices from political whims and winds of change, and, presumably, allow them to hold firmly to the meaning of the Constitution’s words as ever newer, unanticipated legal problems emerge.  Politics has caused never anticipated complications to the balancing work of the Supreme Court.  Elected men and women have added to the responsibilities of the Federal government beyond anything the Founders could have imagined.  The lines between Constitutional powers and protections of individual rights, have become broader and diffuse as politicians have found political power in the invention of new “rights,” many based on falsehoods.  The Left’s penchant for changing the definitions of words has made “equal protection under the law” nearly impossible; foolish politicians have passed laws to accommodate false definitions and whimsical “realities.”  The supreme court is tested to find narrow truths amidst broadened political fantasies.

Yet, the concept of a final arbiter of our Constitutional protections is both wise and essential.  That the U. S. was founded in the presence of printing and publications, forms of mail service and book-binding, kept our founders mindful of the spread of new ideas and opinions.  Launching the new nation on a “ship” of ideals required that some mechanism of preserving and reinforcing those ideas and ideals was essential.  The Supreme Court, almost inadvertently, became that mechanism, thanks to the innovative application of its limited powers by Chief Justice John Marshall.

Finally, the NINTH and TENTH amendments are a combined, simple idea.  Hardly any of our student youth are taught about the Constitution, and few of them, or even of their parents, have knowledge or opinions about the last two amendments of the Bill of Rights.

Amendment 9 admonishes the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT that the rights named and listed in the Constitution – rights of individuals – cannot be construed to “deny or disparage” others (rights) retained by the people.  This is worth contemplating every day and upon every election:  The rights that are inherent in every citizen (unalienable rights), ARE NOT LIMITED to only those “enumerated” in the text of the Constitution, NOR can the constitution be employed to limit any of them!  These few words are quite possibly the most important and far-reaching in our Constitutional system.  EVERY piece of legislation and every surreptitious new regulation that spews forth from the tens of thousands of unelected bureaucrats, should be evaluated BY OUR (ostensible) REPRESENTATIVES as to its neutrality toward or protection of our inherent rights as individual citizens.  What a different “official” status we are each entitled to, than what we are now saddled with.

The 10th Amendment, in effect, reserves to the STATES, much as the 9th reserves to the people, all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government by the Constitution.  It then goes beyond the power of states and reserves the rest to the people, again.  This remarkable Constitution is unique in world history, and exceptional.  The rights secured to the citizens of the United States are exceptional among all the nations.  How is it that we have elected so many to Congress and even to the White House, who do not agree with what the Constitution says and promises to us as citizens?

Dear readers and fellow citizens, the simplest, most Prudent idea of all is to learn, teach, discuss, and study the Constitution and the thinking that supported its ultimate design.  Our students are deprived of the ONLY knowledge that will keep us and them, free.  If you have the ability to communicate to whomever is educating your children, insist that they, and all other teachers, produce high-school graduates who understand our rights and powers as U. S. citizens.